@Eric: I'm sure you're right, but there are a wealth of video lectures there that might take some time to sift through. Can you give a one- to two-sentence description of what TOF sensors are in this chat?

@Eric: Great lecture, and excellent slides. One question I had (and I realize I may need to resubmit this tomorrow) is that "Time of Flight" 3D sensors show up on the Summary slide (slide 22) without previous reference, introduction, or comment in the audio. Would you care to describe TOF sensors and distinguish them from Structured Light and Stereo 3D sensors which you did introduce earlier?

You should be able to access the recorded audio now. If not, please let us know.

I recommend that everyone follow today's lecture from the recording at your convenience, and bring your questions from today's lecture to the Q&A session following tomorrow's lecture. Alternatively, you can email us your questions at info@embedded-vision.com. Also, feel free to post questions on tomorrow's classroom page prior to the start of the lecture.

Listening to it right now... Just finished going through the slides (MUCH prefer the PDF instead of powerpoint; good move). Was amused -- you remember yesterday I asked about LeapMotion? They are doing a 3D sensor play with jawdropping precision (repeatable position-determination of 0.01 millimeters, ten micrometers). THEY aren't saying a whole lot about how they do it, but the only bit I'm missing at this point is whether they are using more than one CCD sensor (some element of triangulation, possibly). Infrared light, lenseless, shadowmask, calibrate with an empty field-of-view speckle pattern which is constantly applied to NEW sensor frames; the intellectual property is the algorithms which extract position and distance data from the sensor stream.

You should be able to access the recorded audio now. If not, please let us know.

I recommend that everyone follow today's lecture from the recording at your convenience, and bring your questions from today's lecture to the Q&A session following tomorrow's lecture. Alternatively, you can email us your questions at info@embedded-vision.com.

Back in the mid 80's, I implemented an embedded vision system to recognize and identify vehicles. The application was a Toll Collection system in South Korea. The drivers there recycle everything and stuff cardboard, etc between the cab and trailer or wherever they can. We took pictures of all the vehicles sold in Korea and used fourier transforms to calculate probalities that a vehicle in the lane was of a certain toll class.

I saw a multi-Kinect system that put each Kinect on a little motion platform. Since the camera and image projector are a single unit, each one sees its own light fine, but all other light from the other Kinects is an ignorable blur. Neat solution.

Even better is when you take a look, google "lenseless imaging shadowmask", you get some serious "structured light" opportunities -- and if you add in "speckle" you get even BETTER stuff. Turns out, apparently, that if you capture a shadowmasked CCD chip speckle image with nothing in the field of view, then ADD something, the CHANGES in the speckle field can in fact be processed to extract a TON of useful information.

Have you dug into the OpenCV website? They have a LOT of useful info, including stuff about what platforms they are currently working with. They also have some pretty useful tool kits (I downloaded 150M zipped tool kit which allows me to monkey around with images on my PC).

Have you designed with image sensors or cameras in the past? If so, what was your biggest challenge?

My biggest challenge was selecting the lens ... mostly due to my lack of knowledge in optics ...

Next biggest challenge was getting a clean image ... on several occasions, with different image sensor manufacturers, there always seemed to be an obscure setting that got the image cleaned up, but was not intuitive to find in the datasheets

Can I integrate OpenCV into an Android device? I'm not familiar at all with CV and looking for starting points and what hardware to use. I'm building a car infotainment system for myself, and it needs video processing feeds.

I work for Blog Talk audio and I'm here to assimilate you! Seriously I work for a large construction equipment design firm and I was hoping to see if vision systems could be applied to autonomous machine navigation

Need to be cautious distinguishing between CCD and CMOS -- one of them gives a "full frame at once", the other one CAN give a "rolling" capture (which makes variations in lighting stand out like a sore thumb).

HAS anyone else heard about the Lytro?? It was a blip there for awhile, because with a small script download, you could take a picture generated with a Lytro device and click on any point IN the image to adjust the focus to put THAT point IN focus. Pretty cool.

Have you designed with image sensors or cameras in the past? If so, what was your biggest challenge? NoHave you heard about structured light or time-of-flight sensors? Have you evaluated or used them? No

Have you designed with image sensors or cameras in the past? If so, what was your biggest challenge? NoHave you heard about structured light or time-of-flight sensors? Have you evaluated or used them? No

Hello everyone. Based on my experimentation yesterday, Mac users should use the Google Chrome browser. The Flash Player add-on for Safari and Firefox (even the latest versions of all) seemed to not work correctly, at least for me.

Interesting. Eric, and not Jeff. Ahh, but I see you ARE here, Jeff. Double-teaming us, eh?

A note to "higher up" -- it appears it would be seriously worthwhile having the audio window popup with some audible "yes, you will be able to hear the official feed when it starts in ..." with a countdown, maybe??

Hey, everyone! (Did I see correctly there may be T-shirts for twenty-five of us here today? Cool!)

The streaming audio player will appear on this web page when the show starts at 2pm eastern today. Note however that some companies block live audio streams. If when the show starts you don't hear any audio, try refreshing your browser.

The streaming audio player will appear on this web page when the show starts at 2pm eastern today. Note however that some companies block live audio streams. If when the show starts you don't hear any audio, try refreshing your browser.

By the way, I don't know who else is happy about getting slides in PDF rather than PowerPoint, but I really appreciate the change. Thanks Jeff, Eric, Ann, Digi-Key, and whoever else helped make this happen.

Industrial workplaces are governed by OSHA rules, but this isn’t to say that rules are always followed. While injuries happen on production floors for a variety of reasons, of the top 10 OSHA rules that are most often ignored in industrial settings, two directly involve machine design: lockout/tagout procedures (LO/TO) and machine guarding.

Focus on Fundamentals consists of 45-minute on-line classes that cover a host of technologies. You learn without leaving the comfort of your desk. All classes are taught by subject-matter experts and all are archived. So if you can't attend live, attend at your convenience.